After 7 Years Of Loneliness, I Still Refuse to Settle for "Mr. Wrong"

After 7 Years Of Loneliness, I Still Refuse to Settle for "Mr. Wrong"

How many kinds of lonely do you think exist in the world? I’ve never actually asked myself before…it just popped up right now because I suddenly Susan wanted to address how lonely I was last year before I decided to go back online.

I was bone deep lonely. Incredibly, cumulatively, overwhelmingly lonely. Seven + years living like a monk without any physical connection to any man; living without any intimate touch or intimate communication. As Jewel sings, "I was half alive but I felt mostly dead".

I was also completely on my own, estranged from most of my family, recreating my world inside and out, figuring out how to make a home again and saving saving saving money. After several long years, I began making new friends that today are the backbone of my existence as well as continuing with the few that stayed with me after the break up. And oc, I had Boo who is what kept me going through more than one dark period. I’m so thankful I have one person in my life I’d willingly, and without hesitation, die for. Truly.

But. The daily minutiae without anyone to help carry the groceries, share dinner and decisions and listen to the day, good or bad, was starting to bleach me out, emotionally. I was Arctic tundra within and I feared I was incapable of connecting with another human being on that level anymore. I’d been unseen and untouched for so long I felt I could no longer join the rest of humanity. I was becoming invisible even to myself.

There was more than one reason it played out like that and I take full responsibility. I just had to go through it and make it out the other side and finally I did. I began the new year with a massive shift in my energy and the desire to see if I had indeed gone so far away I’d never make it back to the land of the living or if I could self resuscitate via online dating. Ha!

Which brings me to another kind of loneliness, the kind when you are lonely for a particular someone-- "someone like you”. Sigh. The kind that makes you sooo mad at yourself and yet also the kind you can’t help indulging and submerging all the rest of your feelings into so they become this amorphous fog of self induced suffering that you almost revel in, it’s so made for tv. Or is that just me?

This kind of loneliness is specific and situational and acute, as in sharp stabbing pains with every breath and every obsessed over memory. It comes with the territory of engaging with members of the opposite sex and their many many random and often indefensible ways. It can and does occur even in the midst of much support and love and friendship of the human and, for me, feline kind. And while it’s much more short term and with practice (!!!) gets easier to manage, it still SUCKS.

But would I trade this kind of loneliness, which has been triggered by more than just BMX in this wild and wooly year of online dating, for what I barely survived all those years before? Absofuckinglutely NOT. Hello!

Here’s why: because every time I get over something/ SOMEONE, I’m not the same person that went into it, which is a good thing. Okay, I may be less inclined to give as much benefit of the doubt but that’s usually temporary. I may be less starry eyed and less likely to believe the next guy whenever he says anything. I’m definitely less heart and more head, a good thing as well.

However, I’m also more resilient. I’m more savvy. I’m more aware and own my choices. I believe I’m doing the best I can do with what I’m given so I can get up and try again because I’ve proved to myself I can recover. From ANYONE.

Loneliness for someone who doesn’t want me, for whatever reason, will always be transitional because I know I deserve so much more--the whole enchilada from an equal partner in crime. I deserve the world I almost left behind for all those long years. I DESERVE IT ALL.

And so do you.

So if you’re lonely right now, reading this post, so sad and so lonely and so afraid, I’m just saying I’ve been there. I fucking LIVED there for far too long. And if I can make it through I know you can.

All the different kinds of lonely can be endured if you know that you are all you have and YOU DESERVE IT ALL.

Will any of us GET it all? I don’t know about you but I sure as fuck am going to try.

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